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Say goodbye to image colorcasts

Added on Friday 21st of August 2009 05:10 am EST

Applications:

Adobe Photoshop CS/CS2/CS3/CS4

Operating Systems:

Macintosh, Microsoft Windows

I have a bunch of images I took indoors at a wedding reception, and it must have been the combination of the lighting and the yellow walls because my images all have a bad yellow colorcast. I’ve been experimenting with the Channel Mixer and different Curves adjustments in hopes of fixing the problem, but my images don’t look much better. Do you have any suggestions for removing a yellow colorcast?

Yellow, blue, green—whatever tint you have cast on your image, there’s one technique you should try first for a possible quick fix. Figure A is a prime example of a dining area with too much yellow cast on the image. To fix it, we won’t mess with the Channel Mixer—we’ll add a Curves adjustment layer. However, we won’t fiddle with the actual curve. Instead, we’ll reset the neutral gray point.

A

Download: To follow along with our example, download the file colorcast.zip from the URL given at the beginning of this article, extract the file yellowcast.jpg, launch Photoshop and open the file. (Images provided by PhotoSpin. Some images modified for educational purposes.)

Keep in mind that you won’t be able to cure every colorcast with a one-click quick fix. But if all it takes to eliminate a color cast from your image is one click of the mouse, it’s a great place to start, and hopefully, stop. An easy way to eliminate a colorcast is to simply reassign your image’s neutral gray pixels, and by doing so the rest of your pixels might fall right into place.

To demonstrate, we’ll add a Curves adjustment layer to set the neutral gray point, apply it to the image, and see what happens.